


Halo of Halogen

by KitsJay



Category: Jack Kerouac RPF, Literary RPF
Genre: M/M, RPF, beat style, but it's nice to think about, didn't really happen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-22
Updated: 2013-09-22
Packaged: 2017-12-27 06:45:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 484
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/975698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KitsJay/pseuds/KitsJay
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>That's IT, baby.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Halo of Halogen

We stopped at a hotel with halogen-sick lit features, bed pushed up against the side and a floor covered with gum wrappers, butts, and condoms but none of that seemed to matter. Neal was on one of his kicks, madly pumping the air and saying things like, "Yow, man! Didja see that? Didja hear him? He had IT, man, holdin' onto it, baby, like it was somethin' he knew about from a dream". 

I watched him and wrote down some of the things he said in my notebook, renewing time, in between lines of text and babbling intellectualism but Neal was a breath of fresh air cowboy from the West and didn't see the jaded, beaten-down shells of Old William and Allen and me, just saw us, breathing in Nietzsche and Spangler doctrine like it was his bread and butter from some far off time. I sat down on the bed to write, and Neal looked over my shoulder to see what I was writing.

"No, no," he said, pointing to a scrawled note, "that ain't right. You gotta put what you feel, honey, not what you see. What you see ain't real, that ain't IT."

I asked him, as I did so often, what IT was and he looked at me with a glint in his eye like he had just seen Heaven like that man standing on the side of the road with his hands to the sky, praying or cursing, looking like a prophet standing in a ditch, reciting voodoo chants into the air at the loas. 

He jerked me forward, pulling me into a kiss that felt like he was devouring me from the inside. My hands moved up to push him away, fluttering in the air like the soft black-and-white kittens of newspapers that blow across a deserted street late at night, but he hauled me closer and stuck his tongue down my throat, gentling the kiss into something more like he was trying to make a girl, not me. I knew Neal was queer, but he wasn't one of those ef-femm-in-ate boys, as he would say, but manly all over and I suddenly felt that manliness and understood the appeal, because Neal's chest was firm where I absently stroked him with faded fingertips, and he tangled one hand in the back of my hair to tilt my head up, bit my bottom lip and ran his tongue over it--slid one hand to my hip and ground against me until I gave it up, leaned back and let him have me just like he wanted. 

With a shudder, he pulled back and put both hands against my face, cradling it between broad hands built for ranching and stealing cars and hauling coal, and looked into my eyes like he was searching for something. Whatever it was, he found it, because he nodded and grinned, saying, "That. That's IT."


End file.
